American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World

18: Exiles and Apostles

18 FLORIDA STRETCHED DOWN to Miami like an endless carny strip. I kept thinking I was going the wrong way-it was all NASA and Gannett media empire and National Enquirer and fuzz-busting Canadian Toyotas down the 1-95 zipper. To the west lay the interior of the state-mostly swampy nothing; the east was the ocean, the beach, the resort outposts of Yankees and other people who still thought Florida was paradise. Miami lay at the very bottom-ahuge metropolis oftoo many nationalities to count and, geopolitics being what they were, heavily bent toward the right-wing death squad side of the political morass. But that was where I was headed. This sideshow state had produced the first American writer to take the path I was on, the journey through the spiritual kingdom of U. S. voudou. In 1929, at age twenty-eight, Zora Neale Hurston ofEatonville, Florida, returned to the South with a B.A. from Barnard and contacts with Langston Hughes and others in the Harlem Renaissance to initiate the studies that would earn her reputation as a pioneer folklorist of rural Southern black culture. Her most original work explored the voudou legacy. 242 EXILES AND APOSTLES - 243 Mules and Men, 1935, collected oral accounts ofhoodoo (as distinct from orisha voudou) in Florida, Alabama and New Orleans , gained by a two-year research trip through the South and parts of the Caribbean. Tell My Horse, 1938, recorded the West Indian experience. Hurston took the Africanized religion ofthe Southernblacks seriously enough to do what no one had previously: record its many tales and participate in its rituals. In Mules and Men, for example, she recounted having lain naked all night in New Orleans to receive the spirit. She drank the blood of sacrifice, was cleansed by hoodoo men, sampled herbs and oils, lit ritual candles. Later, she boiled a black cat to make a mojo ofits bone: When he screamed, I was told to curse him. He screamed three times, the last time weak and resigned. The lid was clamped down the fire kept vigorously alive. At midnight the lid was lifted. Here was the moment! The bones of the cat must be passed through my mouth until one tasted bitter ... . . . Maybe I went off in a trance. Great beastlike creatures thundered up to the circle from all sides. Indescribable noises, sights, feelings. Death was at hand! Seemed unavoidable! I don't know. Many times I have thought and felt, but I always have to say the same thing. I don't know. I don't know.1 Hurston was a pioneer; and, I hoped, a kindred spirit. She knew she was onto something vast, important, and yet so diffused in the American South that trying to grasp it was like trying to hold a handful ofsand. Even today I feel in her writing her chill, her doubt, her sense of awe, her despair. To enter the 244 - AMERICAN VOUDOU spirit world ofvoudou is to know, in some terrible place in your writer's heart, that no matter how many times you taste the blood, feel the spark of a spirit, that you can never make the myth as manifest as does the reality of the act. When I got to Fort Pierce, the beachside resort town where Hurston, fifty-nine and broken, died in a welfare home in 1960, nothing indicatedherburial site. Itwas a pleasantenough townpalm tree avenues, a lazy pace, populated these days by a mix of snowbirds, tourists, and commercial-minded Anglos intent on putting up as many housing and shopping tracts as possible. I went to the town library, where a staffer helped me trace the Garden ofHeavenly Rest, a county-funded cemetery in the poor, mostlyblack and hispanic side oftown. On the way there I passed Sarah's Memorial Chapel, where Hurston's body had been prepared for pauper's burial. The avenues seethed with hoods in late model cars and no visible means of support. At the northern limit of North 17th Street, about a mile in from the shoreline, I came to a crushed shell road leading to an open field full of high weeds and flat gravemarkers, except for one in the center, flanked by two evergreen shrubs. In 1973, the writer Alice Walker had come across much the same sight. Appalled, she contracted for a headstone that would at least proclaim the nature of the soul...